5. Each of these men has been recompensed according to his works. Washington, after having raised a nation to independence, slept peacefully, as a retired magistrate, under his paternal roof, amid the regrets of his countrymen, and the veneration of all people, Bonaparte, having robbed a nation of its independence was hurled, a dethroned emperor, into exile, and the terrified earth hardly thought him secure enough under the custody of the ocean.
6. Even while exhausted and chained to a rock, he was struggling with death: Europe dared not lay down her arms, for fear of him. He died; and this event, published at the gate of the palace before which the conqueror had proclaimed so many funerals, hardly arrested the passer-by. What, indeed, had citizens to weep for!
7. Washington and Bonaparte both arose out of the bosom of a republic. Both were born of liberty; the first was faithful to it, the second betrayed it. Their lot will be according to the different part they chose: very different with future generations. The name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age, and mark the commencement of a new era for the human race: the name of Bonaparte will be pronounced also by distant generations, but no benedictions will be attached to it; it will serve on the contrary, as an authority to oppressors, great and petty of all times.
8. Washington represented completely the wants, the ideas, the state of enlightenment and opinions of his epoch. He seconded, instead of thwarting, the advancing movement: he willed that which he ought to have willed; the fulfilment of the mission to which he was called. Hence the coherence[584] and perpetuity of his work.
9. This man, who strikes the imagination so slightly, because he was natural, and kept within his just proportions, has confounded his history with that of his country: his glory is the common patrimony of increased civilization: his renown rises like one of those sanctuaries whence a stream, pure and inexhaustible, flows forth for ever, for the solace of the people.
10. Bonaparte might also have enriched the public domain. His action was on the nation the most civilized, the most intelligent, the most brave, the most brilliant of the earth. What a rank would he have occupied at present in the universe, if he had joined magnanimity to his other heroic qualities! if—Washington and Bonaparte at the same time—he had nominated liberty the inheritor of his glory!
11. But the disproportioned giant did not completely identify his destiny with that of his country. His genius belonged to modern, his ambition to ancient times. He did not perceive that the miracles of his life by far surpassed the value of a diadem, and that this gothic ornament but ill became him. Sometimes one might see him take a step with the age; at others he would retrograde toward the past. But whether he reascended the stream of time or followed its course, the prodigious force of his genius seemed to command a flow or a flux at his will.
12. Men were, in his eyes, only a means of power: there was no sympathy between their welfare and his own. He promised to liberate, and he enchained them: he separated himself from them, and they shrunk back from him. The kings of Egypt built their funeral pyramids, not amid fertile plains, but sterile sands. On a like site has Bonaparte constructed the monument of his renown.
[579] Travˊ-erses, crosses over.
[580] Ar-beˊ-la, it was near Arbela that Alexander gained his great victory over the Persians.